Obama can face 2012 with his confidence high

James Fenton
16 Dec 2011

As Barack Obama looks towards 2012, how does he feel about his chances of winning a second term? Not indifferent, surely. No President of the United States of America could feel indifferent to the judgment of history, even if, like Lyndon Johnson or Gerald Ford, he came to office unexpectedly, and only indirectly through election.

Dignity is addictive. You develop a taste for it, and democracies throughout history have had to take measures to curb the enthusiasm of their leaders for the power and dignity of high office. The current mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, had the law changed to allow him to run for the third term in 2009. Surprisingly enough, New York was prepared to stretch a point in his favour.

A whiff of failure or obscurity hangs over the one-term presidents: Taft, Harding, Hoover, or, more recently, Ford, who was handed the poisoned chalice of withdrawal from Vietnam, Jimmy Carter, who is still cited as a by-word for weakness, and George H W Bush, for whom fate prepared the subtle humiliation of a two-termer son.

And there is every reason for the first black President of the US to hope and pray that he will not leave the White House without the opportunity to enjoy the second chance that the constitution offers. Obama still has something to prove in this department. It's not rational. It's not nice, either. But remember that it's only three years since black Americans themselves were astonished that one of their number could win the highest office. Don't suppose that white Americans have become accustomed to the situation, or that Obama has not noticed that he is something of a novelty in office.

A weak president, he is often called. To which he, his wife and his associates will often reply that Osama bin Laden didn't find him weak. It makes me wince when I hear this, not because Bin Laden should not have been hunted down, but because this definition of strength is so at odds with what was hoped or expected of Obama when he ran for office.
But still, this is the point most generally conceded in Obama's favour, and it proves a handy way of puncturing the fantasy military pretension of, say, Republican contender Mitt Romney when he claims that Obama is weak, for instance, for not having managed to destroy a drone before it fell into enemy hands.

Obama is not weak, even though the role he was given, in withdrawing from Iraq, was not completely unlike President Ford's poisoned chalice of Vietnam. But this was a chalice Obama chose - campaigned - to be given, and he has managed the last stage of withdrawal without excessive loss of face. At Fort Bragg this week he was elaborate in his praise for individual military units, and his speech ranged over the positive achievements of a military campaign most people would concede was misconceived and mismanaged by his predecessor.

When the public is polled, it freely gives Obama credit both for the killing of Bin Laden, and for the ending of the Iraq war, and it is noteworthy that among the criticisms of his presidency he is blamed for the continued engagement in Afghanistan. Remember that Obama, when campaigning for the presidency, was strongly in favour of the Afghan war. What people voted for was what they got: both engagement and disengagement.

Obama can go to the polls, this time, as a credible military leader and as a foreign policy president. His opponents cannot, of course, concede that this is what he is, but it has been striking how unbelligerent the Republicans currently are.

Then, if Obama is looking to establish his legacy in his second term, there is the question of his greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Health Care Act. It emerged this week that the numbers of young people affected already by this unfolding legislation is much larger than had been thought.

From September last year, insurance plans for parents were obliged to allow adult children up to the age of 25 to remain on family policies. This meant that parents could continue to help their children through a difficult period in which around a third of them had been uninsured. The legislation has worked: an extra 2.5 million young people had benefited from insurance by last June.

According to the Wall Street Journal, when the public was asked about almost any single element in the Affordable Health Care Act, they tended to approve of it. But when asked about the act as a whole, 44 per cent had an unfavourable opinion of it, as against 37 per cent favourable. What remains least popular about the act is the requirement that individuals carry insurance or pay a fine - the so-called individual mandate, which comes into effect in 2014, if it is not thrown out first by the Supreme Court.

You can see, though, that as people realise the benefits of some aspects of the act, they become liable to change their minds about the whole. In the past few months alone, public opinion has switched. In June, according to a CNN/ORC poll, 54 per cent were against the individual mandate, 44 per cent in favour. By November, these proportions had almost reversed: 52 per cent supported the mandate, 47 per cent were against.

Other key trends favour Obama. Unemployment, for instance, recently took a downward turn. But while the economy as a whole remains a subject for gloom, the political opposition is another matter. As things stand, Obama beats all contenders handily. It's very striking that this should be so, but it's a thought from which Obama might allow himself to draw a little comfort in facing 2012. If the Republican presidential candidates can rouse so little enthusiasm among their most devoted followers, what can any of them be expected to do when facing the country as a whole?

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